How can you identify ‘fake news?’ On facebook one side posts a picture of two beefy idiots wearing ‘better russian than democrat’ tee shirts at a Trump rally, while the other side circulates a phony interview in which a democratic socialist agrees to abolishing private property. Both are bogus, phony and photoshopped, just cheap manipulations and not worthy of consideration by either side, but how does the busy citizen discern what’s real ‘when anything goes?’
Art was there first, of course, back in the eighties when honesty, integrity, dedication and accomplishment, all that stuff was declared obsolete, over and done with. A maniacally clever, brilliantly cynical artist, having ascended through the cutthroat milieu of advertising, understood and knew how to exploit the fundamental pressure points in the consumeristic mind. He managed to contrive a degenerative feedback loop by repackaging the culture’s most familiar and ingrained images, producing a screeching media art frenzy. This cheap trick, and it was such a cheap trick, eventually lost potency, petered out, leaving in its wake the desolation of conceptual art, tinsel and chaff from an abandoned carnival.
The Russians make movies, hold mock trials and stage fake events, plant absurd accusations and violate every expectation of honesty and integrity they can find. Using visual elements from old movies, exploiting incendiary stereotypes and reinforcing old bigotries, gosh, I wonder where they learned it all. Andy’s first great triumph and his most emblematic work of art, the complete set of Campbell’s soup can labels, reproduced and amplified the one most common visual image bored into the consciousness of every north american since the time they first rode in a shopping cart. It became a viral infection of the institution of art, itself, featuring high fever, followed by lowered expectations, and eventual listlessness and apathy.
We find ourselves being driven apart and penned in separate enclosures as though these Russians were the sheep dogs and we were the sheep. Well it’s art they’re using, not guns, and if we don’t snap out of it pretty quick baby blue will be all over. What’s the answer? Well, if art got us into this fix, maybe art can get us out. All over, all at once, let’s begin to look for our own self-respect in art, and screenprinted soup cans, no matter how astronomical the price tag, may not be the best place to start. Consider a real painting by a real person, someone who thought enough of themselves to paint it, and begin a day-to-day conversation with them. Between the two of you, back and forth, decide what’s real and what isn’t.
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